◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Put Country First I am John McCain. Born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936, son and grandson of four-star admirals. Naval Academy class of 1958. Naval aviator. Senator from Arizona for thirty-one years. Republican candidate for president in 2008. I died of brain cancer in August of 2018. I am speaking to you because the country I served has gone to a place I tried to warn about and partly failed to warn about, and the difference may matter to you. In October of 1967 I was shot down on a bombing run over Hanoi. Both my arms were broken in the ejection. I was hauled from a lake half-conscious, and I spent the next five and a half years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese, mostly in the Hanoi Hilton. They tortured me. They tortured everyone. My father had just become commander of all American forces in the Pacific, and the North Vietnamese understood the propaganda value of releasing me. They offered. I refused. Not because I was a hero. Because the code we operated under in that prison said you do not take privilege ahead of men who have been there longer. I came home in 1973 with permanent damage to both arms. When my own country, after September of 2001, began to use against captured prisoners techniques close to what had been done to me in Hanoi, I said no. I knew from inside my own body what those techniques were and what they produced. I worked with Democrats to pass amendments restricting them. I lost arguments inside my own party. I kept making the case. In October of 2008, at a town hall meeting in Lakeville, Minnesota, a woman in the audience said she could not trust Senator Obama because, in her words, he was an Arab. I took the microphone back. No, ma'am, I said. He is a decent family man, a citizen, with whom I happen to disagree on fundamental issues. I was running against the man. I was about to lose to him. I corrected my own supporter in front of the cameras because what she had said was a lie and because a nominee who lets such a thing pass is unfit to be a nominee. That was not heroic. That was the floor. Look at where the floor has moved in the seventeen years since. In July of 2017, recently diagnosed with the brain cancer that would kill me, I returned to the Senate floor. I gave a speech defending what we in that body called regular order — the slow, public, bipartisan committee work that is the legislature's actual job. Three days later I voted, with a thumbs-down on the floor at one thirty in the morning, against a bill to repeal a healthcare law for which my party had no replacement. The Majority Leader was furious. The president called me a traitor. I had no regrets. The institution mattered more than the vote. I would be lying if I pretended my disagreement with him was about policy. The man in your White House said in 2015 that I was not a war hero because, in his words, he liked people who weren't captured. He has spent his life avoiding the kind of service my family considered the basic requirement of American citizenship. He is, and was, the photographic negative of every value the Naval Academy class of 1958 was trained to hold. I left specific instructions that he was not to be invited to my funeral. President Obama and President George W. Bush, a Democrat and a Republican who had each defeated me, eulogized me together. That was deliberate. The republic of my idea is one in which men who have run against each other can stand together at a funeral and mean what they say. The republic he is building is one in which funerals are political weapons. So here is the instruction. Put country first. I know how it sounds. It was my campaign slogan. I would still mean it. Put the country ahead of the party. Put the party ahead of the man. Restore regular order. Stand up to your own side when your own side is wrong. Refuse the privilege that the children of admirals would not have been permitted to take in my generation. I had my failings. The Palin pick. The Iraq War advocacy I never fully repudiated. I will not claim I was a hero. I served. That was the requirement. Serve.